


Show Me Your Hand

by akh



Category: Holby City
Genre: F/F, Vegas AU, except only the prologue actually happens in vegas
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-07-21
Packaged: 2018-11-19 20:07:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11320758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akh/pseuds/akh
Summary: Serena had always thought the beauty of one night stands, especially in Vegas, was that you never had to see the person again afterwards (or what would happen if everything was the same but, before they met at Holby, Serena and Bernie had an illicit one night stand following a drunken night in Vegas?)





	1. What happens in Vegas

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Marie-Pier for coming up with the title. :)
> 
> This is a work in progress.

When Serena wakes up, it is with a pounding headache and a mouth as dry as the nearby Mojave desert – apparently the inevitable side effect of a medical conference held in Las Vegas.

 _“Whose bloody idea was Vegas anyway,”_ she mutters to herself as she turns over, squinting towards the light that is cruelly peeking in through the blinds she’d clearly failed to close properly the night before. Even the small movement sends a fresh jolt of pain to her already aching temples.

 _“Great…just great…”_ she huffs as she reaches blindly towards the nightstand, trying to grab hold of anything that might tell her the time – her watch, her phone, the standard hotel alarm clock. Finally she grunts with satisfaction as her fingers close around what she assumes to be her phone.

Except, when she cracks an eye open to look at the screen, she can tell that the phone is not hers.

Suddenly far more awake, she sits up abruptly, head still pounding, and takes in the room around her. The layout looks all wrong. The suitcase in the corner clearly doesn’t belong to her.

It’s definitely not her hotel room.

And she’s not wearing any clothes. Not even underwear.

It’s not exactly the first time she’s ended up having a one night stand at an overnight medical conference – there’d been a couple after Edward - but usually, despite a few glasses of Shiraz spurring the decision, she’s been able to remember most of it the next morning. Now, as she tries to cast her mind back to the previous night, all she can come up with are fragments.

When she closes her eyes she can recall wet, sloppy kisses – a tongue exploring her mouth, a pair of hands traveling down her skin, clumsy from inebriation but still surprisingly effective. A surgeon, probably, Serena decides.

Had it been that balding guy from Princeton who had been all over her at lunch time? Serena can’t imagine it. She had not been interested while sober and can’t believe even copious amounts of alcohol could have made enough of a difference.

As she begins to run through a list of half-acquaintances she might have run into later at the bar, she registers through the haze of her still muddled brain that the water that she hadn’t even realized was running in the bathroom, has suddenly stopped.

A few more moments of anticipation and the door to the bathroom opens, proving all of Serena’s wildest guesses wrong.

He’s not anyone she knows at all.

In fact, he’s not even a he.

Tall and lean, yes, and with the towel wrapped around her midsection revealing a broad set of toned shoulders and arms, but still very unmistakably female.

Had they…? Serena feels her skin prickle with a hot flush as she tries to imagine how she has ended up in this woman’s bed - how she has ended up in any woman’s bed, naked as the day she was born.

She can’t even remember the woman’s name.

After a short impasse, the other woman clears her throat.

“Y-you’re awake,” she peeps, and Serena can tell that she, too, is flustered. “I…um.”

Serena wonders if asking for the woman’s name at this point would be less awkward than asking how they had ended up sharing a bed.

“I think I had a bit too much to drink last night,” she settles on at last. “I’m sorry, I don’t usually….”

“Oh, me neither,” the other woman interrupts, taking a step forward but then pausing again. Serena watches with quiet fascination as the movement sends a few droplets of water rolling form the woman’s hair down her neck, glistening against the still moist skin. She swallows.

Serena continues to watch as the woman begins gathering her clothes, spots some of her own on the floor, too, scattered around in a tell-tale way.

“I- I’ve never been with a woman before,” she blurts out suddenly, needing to fill the awkward silence with something.

The woman pauses just as she’s about to hang some sort of a metal chain around her neck. Serena watches it dangle between her fingers until she realizes she’s looking at a pair of dog tags.

A soldier.

“Ah, well…” the woman says after a beat and clears her throat but doesn’t say anything more, hangs the tags around her neck and starts scanning the floor. She spots a bra, then frowns a little as she realizes it’s not her own.

Serena’s eyes flicker across the room to the arm of a plush chair where another bra of a smaller cup size seems to have landed.

The other woman’s eyes follow hers and she mumbles a quiet “thanks” before walking over to the chair to grab the garment.

She disappears into the bathroom for a moment and returns soon wearing boxer shorts and a form fitting t-shirt in military green, comes to sit down on the bed that Serena still hasn’t managed to move from.

“This is clearly making you uncomfortable,” she says and Serena can sense the beginning of a speech she has probably quickly worked out while in the bathroom.

“I-it’s making me uncomfortable too,” she admits before Serena can interject, gesturing vaguely with her hands.

“You want to forget it ever happened?” Serena asks, feeling her stomach drop unexpectedly. She quickly chalks the strange sensation up to the hangover. Of course they should forget it ever happened. Technically, she already has forgotten.

“This…the one night stand…Vegas…” the other woman continues, stumbling over her words. “It’s not really how I usually…I’m actually….” She pauses, seems to reconsider, and then takes a breath. “We were both drunk and I’m not really sure how far…that is, I can’t remember…”

“Oh thank God,” Serena blurts, letting out a relieved laugh. “Me neither!”

The other woman looks at her, confused.

“I mean I can’t remember either, I thought it was just me,” Serena admits readily. Somehow she feels the knowledge that they’ve both woken up with no clear memory of the night before puts them on a more even ground, doesn’t even want to think how she’d feel about the alternative.

“Oh,” the other woman breathes, and Serena thinks she can see something like relief wash over her features too.

“Serena Campbell,” Serena extends her hand, feeling more confident now. “I’m here for the medical conference. Meant to fly back home today.”

She blushes a little and quickly adjusts her sheet when she realizes her sudden movement has made her expose her still very naked chest.

The other woman, clearly flustered by the brief show, takes a moment to reciprocate.

“Uh…Bernie,” she says at last, taking the offered hand.

“In her Majesty’s service?” Serena asks, raising an eyebrow as she inclines her head toward the tags dangling around the woman’s neck.

The woman…Bernie…looks down, her hand going reflexively to the tags, and then nods her head, smiles a little smile that Serena decides looks good on her.

“RAMC,” she replies. “I’m a trauma surgeon.”

Serena let’s out a satisfied hum. At least she had been right about her being a surgeon.

“So, duty calls?” she asks with a hint of regret in her voice. Maybe it’s the alcohol still in her, but she finds herself wondering what it would be like to kiss Bernie now that she’d be able to remember it, or what it would be like to really feel those nimble fingers on her – in her – now that her senses aren’t dulled by too much Shiraz.

Bernie holds her gaze for a moment, as if trying to read her mind. She licks her lips and then seems to make a decision, shifting a little closer to Serena.

“Not for a couple of hours,” she says, the response somehow coming out almost as a question, or perhaps a suggestion.

 _‘It’s Vegas,’_ Serena thinks wildly, her eyes darting to Bernie’s lips, the fresh moisture from her tongue still glistening on them. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she can recall her mother’s sound advice from decades ago: _‘You should try everything at least once.’_

“Well then,” she says out loud, lifting her sheet enough to make the offer clear. “Let’s see if we can actually make a memory of it.”


	2. Chapter 2

“Which part of ‘I need my car today’, are you struggling to understand?” Serena snaps into her phone, frustrated. “...Hello?”

It’s beginning to dawn on her that she has been hung up on when an unexpected voice from behind her back suddenly catches her attention.

“Engine been growling or whining?”

Serena whips her head around at the sound of the voice, her eyes immediately landing on a tall, blonde woman who is walking towards her.

“Any intermittent smell of hot or…?” The woman who had been approaching her suddenly stops dead in her tracks, her big, dark eyes staring at Serena in shock. “...or burning rubber,” she finishes faintly, the cigarette that had been dangling between her lips falling from her mouth.

***  
 _  
Serena closes her eyes as Bernie’s nimble fingers graze her skin, soft and exploring._

_“Hmm, that feels…” she hums, but doesn’t bother to finish as her mouth finds a better occupation in teasing Bernie’s earlobe - an action that elicits a gasp from the other woman._

_“Good?” Bernie finishes breathlessly for her, and it’s Serena’s turn to gasp when Bernie’s fingers find purchase near her thighs, the soft exploration of skin gaining purpose as the fingers are replaced by the expanse of Bernie’s palms, gently pushing Serena’s legs further apart.  
_  
***

Serena’s mind snaps back to the present.

“Good God,” she breathes, looking at the blonde woman standing before her now - fully clothed but unmistakably the same.

“Uh, no, just me,” Bernie laughs awkwardly, picking up her fallen cigarette.

They stare at each other for a moment and then Bernie steps a little closer, her eyes on the car.

“Alternator might be cactus,” she offers helpfully, but her cheeks are as red as Serena imagines her own must be.

“Uh, thank you...that sounds bad,” she manages nervously.

“It is if you want to drive anywhere,” Bernie replies, toying with her cigarette. She finally looks up briefly to meet Serena’s eyes.

“Funny I- I don’t recall you being a mechanic,” Serena blurts out, her mind still lingering on the very vivid flashback that Bernie’s unexpected appearance had triggered. She is suddenly feeling very hot under her collar.

“No...no, still a trauma surgeon,” Bernie replies, uneasily shifting her weight from one foot to another. “I, um - I work here now,” she adds awkwardly.

Serena had always thought the beauty of one night stands, especially in Vegas, was that you never had to see the person again afterwards.

Not that she hadn’t, in the months following Vegas, imagined a dozen of ways of running into Bernie again, but that was different. In those scenarios she never stood dumbfounded in front of her useless car, trying to remember how to string full sentences together. She always had something terribly clever to say. Terribly clever and terribly short, because invariably those scenarios ended up with the two of them in bed together, recreating the morning they had spent in Bernie’s hotel room. Sometimes it wasn’t even the bed, but a shower or a sofa, perhaps even a kitchen counter, if Serena was feeling particularly adventurous.

But at no point had she ever imagined sharing a workplace with Bernie. It had never even entered her mind as a possibility because she had always thought of Bernie firmly settled somewhere far away, in Afghanistan, or Iraq, perhaps even Syria. In the scenarios she had imagined (she might as well call them fantasies) they would always run into each other by chance while Bernie was on leave. They would share a night of passion and Bernie would be gone by the morning. No commitment, no plan of meeting again, and yet...

“Um...I’m Berenice Wolfe, by the way,” Bernie’s voice suddenly interrupts Serena’s thoughts. She looks up in time to see Bernie extend her hand forward.

“I don’t think I ever gave you my full name,” Bernie adds sheepishly, her eyes cast down, cheeks still a rosy shade of red.

_Berenice Wolfe._ Serena’s mind swirls at this new piece of information, a mild panic setting in. _Had she accidentally slept with and been fantasizing about the Berenice Wolfe? The famous trauma surgeon, practically a celebrity in their field?_

Drawing in a shaky breath, Serena takes the extended hand and gives it a solid shake, the touch somehow lingering longer than it should have, by any standards.

“Serena Campbell,” she finally repeats her own name, not sure if Bernie is likely to remember it. Either way, she doesn’t want to assume. Then, eyeing the cigarette still in Bernie’s hand, she attempts some levity: “I think you’re meant to light it.”

“Oh, it’s a…” Bernie clears her throat, suddenly even more flustered than before. “I’ve had this cigarette for two years. My...I mean, I quit when British forces left Helmand. I tore up every cigarette I had, except this one.” She holds up the lone cigarette. “I...I suppose I thought I’d keep it as a symbol of my...freedom.” She looks down, mumbles at her shoes: “Of my old, independent self.”

Serena frowns, not quite sure how the analogy works, but is willing to let it slide, owning it to the fact that they both are clearly taken aback by the unexpected meeting.

“As symbols of freedom go, it’s a bit pants,” she jokes instead, hoping to lighten the mood. “A nice bottle of Shiraz, however…”

_‘...leads to unadulterated sex with a stranger in a Las Vegas hotel room, especially if you have more than one bottle,’_ her mind supplies, unhelpfully.

“...goes really nicely with a fag,” Bernie finishes, her tone wistful.

Serena smiles. “Oh dear, you’ve clearly made a great sacrifice for your health.”

The smile that Bernie returns looks a little strained. “Yeah,” she replies, putting the cigarette back in its pack before pocketing it. “I should probably…” She points vaguely in the direction of the hospital doors.

Serena nods, feeling a mixture of relief and disappointment to find their short conversation dwindling to its end.

“Thanks for the tip,” she quips as Bernie starts turning away, a phone in hand. “About the alternator,” she adds in response to her puzzled look. “I’ll look into it.”

Bernie seems to relax a little, the smile spreading across her face now looking less strained. “It was nice to see you,” she says, her eyes lingering a moment on Serena’s face.

Serena smiles back. “Likewise,” she replies, and can’t help adding: “Don’t be a stranger, now that you’re here.”

As Bernie nods and turns to leave, Serena bites her tongue, hoping she hasn’t said too much, or appeared too eager.

For all she knows, Bernie probably hasn’t spared a thought for her at all since that morning in Vegas.

A soldier like her, she probably has a girl waiting in every port, or at least has better things to do than to give more than a passing thought to someone she once slept with.

And for that matter, Serena isn’t sure what she wants from Bernie either - hasn’t been with another woman since Bernie, and isn’t sure if it’s something she would even be into in general. She isn’t sure if the magic of that morning and the subsequent fantasies of its repetition would stand the scrutiny and reality of sober daylight.

Still, she thinks of little else for the rest of the day.


End file.
